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You can easily install Celestia on computers running Windows, MacOS or Linux. If you are experienced in compiling programs from source code, you can also install it on computers running other operating systems.

If you have downloaded the Windows version of the Celestia installation executable, then you simply need to run the .EXE file you downloaded.

Windows XP is the preferred OS at the moment, but you can also setup Celestia in Windows Vista or Windows 7.

A few words of caution to Windows Vista users, however... (These may also apply to Windows 7.)

If you run the setup program as a Windows XP-compatible application, you'll find that the program runs fine and that Celestia operates as it should. You can also run the Celestia executable in the native Windows Vista mode too.

Savvy Windows XP users will find that there are a lot of things to get used to in the XP-compatible mode though. If you modify a planet texture, for example, you may find that your modified texture was NOT saved to the Celestia program directory where you got it from originally.

Vista likes to create shortcuts to modified textures, and these - for some reason - aren't readily available to the Celestia program. If you're using Windows Explorer to view the Celestia texture files, click on the "Compatibility Files" area at the top of your screen to see your modified texture. If you like, you can then copy and/or move the new texture to the C:\Program Files\Celestia\textures directory of your choice.

Recommendations:

Vista users should install Celestia as a native Vista program. When Celestia is installed as a previous version of Windows-compatible program, it simply causes more problems than it solves.

Vista and Win7 are particularly protective of software installed in the Program Files directory tree. You will have far fewer problems if you install Celestia somewhere else. You could, for example, create the directory C:\MyPrograms\ and install Celestia there.

Celestia is provided for Mac OS in a disk image. Once you have downloaded the file, simply open it and then copy the application file "Celestia" from the window that shows up to the "Applications" folder, as for most applications in the Mac OS.

build from source !!!!
For some odd ( and unknown reason) most repos have OLD versions in them .
In the case of Ubuntu ,it is split into free and non-free ???? odd seeing as everything IS free .
Some of the repos even have celestia 1.5 in them ( 1.6.1 is current with 1.7 coming very soon) .
Also none that i have seen build celestia with SPICE support - so NO spice kernels if installed from an rpm or deb or xz .
Also there ARE NO prebuilt packages using qt 4 for KDE4 .So no kde4 /qt 4 prebuild rpm's, or deb's or xz's .

Every Linux distro dose things a bit different but the major have this in their software repos
for example
fedora -- " yum install celestia "
-- but this is WITHOUT spice support
OpenSUSE -- " zypper in celestia "
-- also WITHOUT spice support